Graduation Day | 1981 | USA | Herb Freed

Releasing in the wake of Friday the 13th’s success, Herb Freed’s school-based stalk ‘n’ slash exercise was surprisingly lucrative in cinemas and remains wildly popular amongst slasher buffs. Laura beats the national record in the school sprint race but in her moment of victory, collapses exhaustedly onto the tarmac, dying in front of the crowd. Soon after, an assassin wearing a fencing mask begins slicing and dicing their way through the aerobics team with a variety of sports-related implements, all within Laura’s record sprint time on their stopwatch. Laura’s suspicious sister Anne, coach Michaels and a plethora of other suspects may just have taken Laura’s untimely death too deeply. While it boasts some interesting death sequences involving javelins, fencing epées and booby-trapped crash mats, this isn’t a particularly gruesome example of the genre. The DPP had it seized in any case.